between commercials for Thighmaster 6000 and 888-GALPALS. Most of the city had never heard of them. Their advertising budget amounted to the same number every quarter: 0.
And they'd been in business for 170 years.
They occupied half of the twenty-eighth floor of Two International. The windows facing east overlooked the harbor. Those facing north peered down on the city. None of the windows had blinds. All doors and cubicles were constructed of frosted glass. Sometimes, in the dead of summer, it made you want to put your coat on. The typeface on the glass entrance door was smaller than the door handle:
Duhamel-Standiford
Suffolk County , MA
Estab. 1840
After I was buzzed through that door, I entered a wide anteroom with ice-white walls. The only things hanging on the walls were squares and rectangles of frosted glass, none more than a foot wide or tall and most in the seven-by-nine range. It was impossible to sit or stand in that room and not suspect you were being watched.
Behind the sole desk in that vast anteroom sat a man who'd outlived everyone who could remember a time when he hadn't sat there. His name was Bertrand Wilbraham. He was of indefinable age-could have been a weathered fifty-five or a sprightly eighty. His flesh reminded me of the brown bar soap my father used to keep in the basement washroom and, except for two very thin and very black eyebrows, his head was hairless. He never even sported a five-o'clock shadow. All male employees and subcontractors of Duhamel-Standiford were required to wear a suit and tie. The style of said suit and tie was up to you-although pastels and floral prints were frowned upon-but the shirt had to be white. Pure white, no pinstripes, however subtle. Bertrand Wilbraham, however, always wore a light gray shirt. His suits and ties changed, hard as it might have been to tell, from solid grays to solid blacks to solid navies, but the gray, protocol-busting shirts remained the same, as if to say, The revolution will be dour.
Mr. Wilbraham did not seem terribly fond of me, but I took comfort in knowing he didn't seem terribly fond of anyone. As soon as he buzzed me in that morning, he raised a small pink phone memo from his immaculate desktop.
"Mr. Dent requests your presence in his office as soon as you've arrived."
"I've arrived."
"Duly noted." Mr. Wilbraham opened his fingers. The pink sheet of paper dropped from his hand and floated into the wastebasket.
He buzzed me through the next set of doors and I went down a hallway with a dove-gray carpet. Halfway down, there was an office used by subcontractors like me when we had to log office hours on behalf of the company. It was empty this morning, which meant I had squatter's rights. I entered and allowed myself the brief fantasy that it would be mine, permanently, by day's end. I cleared the thought from my head and dropped my bags on the desk. The gym bag held my camera and most of my surveillance equipment from the Trescott job. The laptop bag held a laptop and a photo of my daughter. I unholstered my gun and placed it in my desk drawer. It would stay there until day's end, because I like carrying a gun about as much as I like eating kale.
I left the glass box and walked the dove-gray hallway up to Jeremy Dent's office. Dent was vice president of labor relations and the man who'd first subbed work out to me two years ago. Before that, I'd worked independently. I'd had a rent-free office stuffed in the belfry of St. Bartholomew's Church. It was a thoroughly illegal arrangement between me and Father Drummond, the pastor. When the Archdiocese of Boston had to start paying the piper for decades of covering up child rape by sick priests, they sent an appraiser to St. Bart's. Whereupon my rent-free office vanished as completely as the bell that had once resided in the belfry but hadn't been seen since the Carter presidency.
Dent came from a long line of Virginia gentlemen soldiers and had graduated third in his class at West Point. Vietnam, War College, and a quick climb up the armed forces career ladder had ensued. He drew command duty in Lebanon in the mid-eighties, came back home, and pulled the plug. Walked away from the whole deal at thirty-six and the rank of lieutenant colonel, for reasons never fully understood. He crossed paths with old family friends in